


Northwest Passage

by drawlight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, Eventual Happy Ending, Falling In Love, Fantasizing, Greaser Dean Winchester, Love Confessions, M/M, Mechanic Dean Winchester, Minor Character Death, Murder, Obsession, Pining, Romance, Time Skips, Writer Castiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-06 15:10:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17942033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: Dean Winchester, a silent high school heartthrob, becomes the obsession of a small Michigan town during a lurid murder trial. Castiel Novak cannot look away.





	Northwest Passage

**Author's Note:**

> To my teenage years, when I assumed I was at the peak of my passion. (To my later years, learning that was untrue.) 
> 
> And a thank you to saltnhalo and MaggieMaybe160, for their sharp beta eyes and willingness to talk this piece off of the ledge.

 

 _“How does distance look?" is a simple direct question._  
_It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”_  
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

 

_Part One_

Stay Gold, Ponyboy

 

_Knucklebone, Michigan_

_2000_

 

Dean Winchester came out of the west.

Came out of the west, tanned limbs reaching all the lean long day. When the sheriff had pulled him over for driving underage and without a license, Dean Winchester had explained, in his quiet voice (as they would all later learn was his way), that his mama had been driving and had gotten faint. His grandpa though, ol’ Bobby Singer, in his wide Stetson, was giving very good directions. Dean absolutely swore to it. Up and down. _Honest, sir._ He was perched on a couple of phone books in order to better see over the wide dashboard of the Impala. His younger brother’s ten-year-old face peered out of the back window like a moon.

“You promise you’re just goin’ straight home?”

“Yessir, I promise, sir.” Dean had said, and maybe it was then that the girls of Knucklebone (and Castiel) first caught a glimpse of Dean Winchester. Had caught wind of the stale sweat rising off of his young skin, blending in with cotton and that old leather jacket. Maybe it was then that they first fell in love.

You never forget your first love. And Dean was _everybody’s_ first love. That is everyone with a properly beating heart in Knucklebone, Michigan, population 6,450 (about twelve miles west of Traverse City as the crow flies). How else can you explain the intense bated breath and fascination for the seventy-four-hour manhunt when the Michigan state police had sought Dean Winchester in connection with the gunshot murder of his mother’s lover in his mother’s house?  No, that wasn’t the Dean Winchester that everyone secretly thrilled to, although they were fascinated by his heavy-lidded eyes and steadfast refusal to speak or defend himself. No, it was a different time, something earlier and more precious, that everyone kept wrapped up in their hearts. A time when Dean was a quiet student at Knucklebone High School in a black jacket and a black car. Castiel Novak cherished it, let it run through his fingers like water.

Dean had kept silent throughout the trial. Had entered a quiet, respectful plea of _not guilty (by reason of self-defense)._ His heavy stare had been printed on the front page of every newspaper, on the glossy cover of every magazine. Castiel had bought them all, had torn out every photograph, taped them up on the matte-paint walls of his bedroom. _Eggshell white_ , his stepmother had called it. _Don’t damage the paint_ , she had said.

It didn’t matter, not really. His stepmother would have forgiven him for pasting up photos of Dean Winchester. Everyone was in love with him. Mothers and fathers too.

They still keep all the papers, Castiel and the others, even if they doubt Dean’s guilt. The sensational headlines scream from every wall, every textbook, every locker. MICHIGAN TEEN TRIED IN BLOODTHIRSTY MURDER OF MOTHER’S LOVER.

 

* * *

 

Exploration is a strange desire. If we are careful, logical, prudent, then we would stay in spaces that are known. In _out there,_ there are dangers that we’ve never considered. Think of the astronaut slowly running out of air. Think of Mount Everest, with corpses used as wayfinders, failed explorers saying _keep on, don’t sleep or you’ll die._ Think of ships marooned for weeks on still waters, the sea stretching out for miles in every direction, identical and aching, no way to fumble back to shore.

His parents go to church. Sing psalms on Sundays, watch football later. “That’s not my religion,” Castiel says to his stepmother.

“Well, what kind of religion are you?”

“I’m a survivalist.”

 

* * *

 

Dean never says much. He never complains, never lets anyone close. When he shows up to school with a bruised eye, painted in a sunset of maroons and violets, he doesn’t say a thing.

“Jesus, Dean, what happened to you?”  Michael says. (Castiel winces, Michael is never good at reading the room.) But Dean only shrugs, a flush on that suntanned and sunfreckled face, like a silent _no big deal, you got a problem with that?_ (Cas studies the flush, rooted somewhere south of Dean’s collar. He would like to trace it back to its roots to discover the start.)

When he does talk, when there is a low _hello_ or a quiet _how are you, ma’am,_ the voice has a gentle drawl. It leans on vowels in a way that isn’t Michigan, but is somewhere west, probably Texas, maybe New Mexico. No one knows for sure. (Even the papers during the trial would get it all wrong, confuse their sources. Claim that he was born in Las Vegas one day, in Austin the next.) All that matters, Castiel knows, is that Dean is from anywhere but Knucklebone. _Anywhere but here._

Not Knucklebone, where Castiel had been born and raised. He has not gone far past its borders. His father takes him up north sometimes, where the woods and water are wild, where wolverines might still roam. He had gone fly fishing on Drummond Island. He’d visited Canada once, Chicago once, Florida once. Little adventures, too little and too late. (He wants to go everywhere, to know the sand on distant beaches, to know salt flats and mountains, tundras and deserts. _Let me inherit the earth._ ) There is so much _more_ to the world than his little town and its myriad of shopping malls. Go past the Unitarian church on the hill, past the stained glass windows. Past the Shell station on the corner, selling Cokes at two for three dollars. Beyond the old Frank Lloyd Wright house, where Crowley’s grandparents had once lived (a public museum now with tours on Mondays and Wednesdays). Past Fort Mishawaka, the historic camp of the original logging town. Go on, further out, further back.

He aches for so much _more_ than Knucklebone. Hungry and skinny, seventeen-years-old and _waiting wanting hoping_ for his life to start. He leans into Dean (“ _vicious”_ , the newspapers had said), wanting to take a little of Dean Winchester for himself. The summer of the murder is a heavy one. The wind blows hot and threatening. All of Knucklebone aches for something they cannot name. Violent and hot. They clutter under windows, dangerous as birds on a wire in a tornado.

Castiel stares at Dean in classes. They are both quieter than the rest, though in different ways. Compares himself, self-conscious in his stubborn nose, his thin chapped lips. Dark-haired and pale-eyed. Blue eyes are the absence of melanin, the absence of color. Castiel has no color, no magic, no nothing. Not like Dean, who has skin the color of oak bark, who has eyes like aphids and putrescine. Dean is color where Castiel has none.

Sometimes, it seems like Dean stares back. When Cas glances, looks at the corner desk, sometimes that heavy gaze is already there. Something, some wild and desperate want, crawls up the back of Cas’ throat, lays thick on his tongue. Summer is coming, always more primitive, always more untamed. Violent things happen in summer. (Dean had killed a man in the summer. _Self-defense._ Cas tries to picture what the dead man had looked like. The peninsula of his pale and stiff body jutting out into the crimson lake of spilled blood. Summertime, this wretched heat, lovers will kill each other now. Blame it on the dry wind. Blame it on the spindrift.)

 

* * *

 

How many mythical places have we sought? We study their goals from the vantage point of _after,_ superior in our knowledge of atlases and globes. Juan Ponce de León, that Spanish explorer, had sought the Fountain of Youth in the backyards of Florida. Sir Walter Raleigh looked for El Dorado along the Orinoco, bringing empty bags in hope of gold. Perhaps that most American of mythologies is the search for the Northwest Passage.

The West, we must understand, was explored out of hope for a sea route to open trade. Dean Cabot had left in 1497, sent by Henry VII. Others would follow, some doomed, some would live, none of them successful. Why did we sail the Saint Lawrence? In search of China, in search of spice. Stymied here, in Michigan, at these inland seas, these greatest of lakes, filled with deep waters of glaciermelt. _Is this China?_ They would ask, breathless and tired, those old explorers. _Did we make it?_

Castiel would like to explore. To strike out and discover. What explorer hasn’t left home without thinking their town was too small, their name was too small, their destiny too small? They stretched out, arms and eyes open to the world, saying _this this this is all mine._

(Do we explore because our lives are too small? Too claustrophobic, boxed in here in with these paltry city blocks and shopping malls. Or do we explore because we must? Because we wake up in our beds with the realization of _otherness,_ of _monstrosity?_ We begin to learn our hearts, the flow of our blood, how it is not like the others in the town. Different and inverted and wrong. So, in our shame, our deep guilt of getting this most basic of things _wrong,_ we must cast out to other towns, other lands. Try on other cities like clothing.)

 

* * *

 

Dean lives over on Water Street now. Not in the four-bedroom picket-fenced house of his first arrival, where he’d stayed with his mother and brother (where the gun had been fired, rust-colored blood spilled). Not in the chain of cheap motel rooms that he’d booked under false names and false credit cards during his three-day run from the law. Not in the cell he’d shared at Muskegon Juvenile Detention Center. (That one Castiel has never been to, never crowded up to like a thirsty groupie. He had thought about it briefly, put it away.) He’d maxed out, as they understood. Had gotten into fights, maybe every fight. _They weren’t his fault,_ everyone said. _He was the best of them all,_ everyone said. Castiel is _certain_ that none of these fights were Dean’s fault. You could feel the honor in the way Dean walks, the way he squares his shoulders. No, the entirety of Knucklebone High is certain, Dean isn’t a guy who is going to take shit from anybody. You’d have to kill him to make him bend.

Castiel _has_ been to Water Street. They go in their cars sometimes, the rest of the high school class. All permutations, all groups. Who doesn’t love Dean Winchester? Sit in their cars, cut the engines, turn out the headlights. Castiel goes in Gabriel’s Honda. They know which windows are Dean’s. The often-dark northwest corner. _Who do you think he has up there?_ They need to know, take guesses. _Who do you have in your bed, Dean Winchester?_ Pushed into sweaty sheets, would he talk then? No one kisses and tells, they have to guess, leave it to their desperate imaginations.

What sits on Water Street? Empty parking lots, empty strip malls, fading neon lights. They go, Castiel in the backseat, and drink up the surroundings of Dean’s new neighborhood, as if by consuming the surroundings they could steal a bit of Dean Winchester himself. (Castiel aches to know. Who is Dean Winchester? So many fantasies spiral out, it is easy to forget that they have only spoken once or twice. But Castiel has Dean’s mugshot on his eggshell wall, his visions in his head.)

Meg Masters gets drunk, leaning heavily out of the window of a Jeep. _“Come on down, Dean Winchester.”_ (They all know that Dean won’t come down. He never does, if he hears them at all. It is common knowledge that he has been released from prison on probation, cannot move without surveillance, cannot breathe without being watched. “Can you go up there? Is that allowed?” Meg had asked. Castiel had frowned, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t want Meg up there at least. But no one knew of anyone Dean had ever taken upstairs. It didn’t matter then.)

Everything they know of Dean, they’ve scraped from newspapers. His birthday (January), his father’s name (John). After Dean was taken into prison, the Winchesters had disappeared from Knucklebone. No one knew where they had gone. It had surprised all of them, surprised Castiel, who had assumed that the Winchesters would stand by Dean. When he came back, he’d been banned from all extracurricular activities. Barred from the football team. (The coach had taken it as a personal offense, Dean had been his star player.)

It might be due to _probation_ but the singular fact remains that Dean Winchester _lives alone._ He is the only student to do so. To Castiel, it radiates mystery and a melancholy seductiveness. On his own, like an adult. While Castiel hovers back on the precipice of childhood, still nervous about college majors, Dean strides forward never asking a question, never apologizing. There is a curfew for probation. He cannot be on school property after 3.00 pm. Cannot be out of his apartment past nine. No drinking. No driving more than fifteen miles in any given direction. Does he wear an ankle bracelet? He has to. Castiel watches his feet, aching to know.

Castiel isn’t really like the other kids crammed into the Accord. Gabriel passes a pack of American Spirits around. They all fumble at the cigarettes, inhaling incorrectly, pulling the smoke down into their stomachs and not their lungs. The cigarettes (and the beer) were a thrilling secret against their parents, who would have been scandalized (though it was their packs that had been stolen, they all smoked too). Charlie Bradbury nudges Cas, offering him a cigarette. Dally from _The Outsiders_ comes to Cas’ mind. _“Gotta cancer stick, Johnnycakes?”_ Dally had said. Cas can never look at a cigarette without hearing that play in his mind. He takes the cigarette anyway. It doesn’t taste good; it doesn’t taste bad. He doesn’t ask for another. His reflection stares back at him in the dark car window. The square Slavic nose, the frowning lips, wild and bleak hair. Unsteady, concerned eyes. He stares at himself long enough that the face ceases to make sense, looking for someone else to emerge.

“What if he comes down? What if he sees us?”

“Oh my god, can you imagine?”

 

* * *

 

It is different, Water Street and East Hills. Castiel chafes at his address, the carefully manicured lawns, the expensive wainscoting. Deciduous trees line his street, maples and oaks mainly. It is odd to him that while the basics of his home and Dean’s are the same (four walls, floor, ceiling, a door), the world within is so different.

Take a walk through the air Castiel breathes. The soft brown Berber carpet, the television set the size of Alaska. The curtains match the upholstery in a careful way. His parents had gone to Knucklebone High, had graduated 1977, high school sweethearts. (They must have had their own passions once, their own fascinations, their own Dean Winchesters. It is hard to tell now, that gap between forty-two and seventeen. Unbreachable, uncrossable.) The television never shuts off, they eat barbecued chicken from the grill without knives and forks, the sauce dripping down their hands, sucking it off from their fingers.

Castiel keeps his eyes in books, in other worlds. Creatures in rock pools. Distant kingdoms. Out among the stars. They have big plans for him, his stepmother and father. “You’re good with science,” his father says, cutting the gristle from his steak. “You could be a doctor.” Think then of whitewashed halls, the smell of bleach, the echo of a PA. Exposed bone, blood, the drip of morphine like a pearl in a vein. He’d rather drink ammonia. “What do you want to do with your life, Castiel? You need to start thinking about it.”

“I could write a book,” he says, spearing at peas on his plate. “Or become a fisherman.”

(His mother does not have plans, she cannot. Consider his mother, dark-haired and lake-eyed, like himself. His mother, who had driven her car off of a bridge into the lake. Smashed clean through the steel girders, had revved the engine, pressed her foot down on the accelerator. _A suicide,_ the police department had ruled it. He doesn’t think of her.)

 

* * *

 

During the hunt, Dean had gone north. The state troopers had tracked him up US-131, over the bridge as it swayed in a summer squall, up into the Upper Peninsula. He’d been making a dash for Canada. A great escape. “He almost made it, you know,” Charlie Bradbury says. She had been the official keeper of the press during the manhunt and trial. A large three-inch and three-ring binder stuffed with every article they could find, every photo carefully torn out and taped inside. The ones from the arrest are the best, so she keeps them up front. The papers had liked them too, Dean’s swollen and bloodied face, bottom lip thick and pomegranate red. That _fuck you, buddy_ look to the absinthe-green eyes. They stood in front of their bathroom mirrors, pushing their mothers’ Jergens lotions aside, trying to emulate it for themselves. Never quite right; something always off. (Castiel had held that same paper up, stared into his own mirror. Had tried to pull off the same violent stare, the same frank eyes. It is hard for him to study Dean without spending a little too long on the curve of the neck, the thick cord of muscle snaking up it. On the heavy-lidded eyes, the cupid’s bow of the mouth. Does he want to be Dean or touch Dean? Can it be both? He doesn’t know.)

Castiel wants to go north. It is such a tempting thing, the lack of finality. Where does north end? He could go up, onward past the lake, up past Ontario, into the depths of Canada where the geese are wild, where there are men with twenty-seven words for snow. There is no magic here, Castiel has always wanted magic. He picks little sprigs of thyme, tucks them in his pocket.

 

* * *

 

They always go to Water Street after sundown. _Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester, come out and play._

You could tell he was home by the car. A shining 1967 Impala (they had looked it up once, desperate for any fact to hold). Black and sleek, sinister in its appeal. Sometimes Cas forgets that he’s never been inside, he knows that car so well. Promise sits in the lines of the car, in the curve of the bumper, the arc of the wheel. _Climb inside,_ it seems to say (in Dean’s voice), _let’s go for a drive._

The window sits open, cracked by four or five good inches. It is thrilling. _He could hear us._ It is terrifying. _He could see us._ Castiel imagines Dean leaning to open the window. Maybe he had been too hot, overheated. The heat can’t be good in these apartments, not like the central air of his parents’ house, over in a safe and antiseptic part of town called East Hills. These apartments were radiator and steam heat. Dean had probably taken off the jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, biceps flexing as he pressed the window sash upward.

Gabriel likes to tease, his voice calls out softly, maybe loud enough to be heard, maybe not. “Winchester, Winchester, let down your hair.” Someone elbows Gabriel in frantic reaction, the whole shivering mass of them gasping with the audacity. _Had he heard us?_ They thrill to the possibility like young cats in heat. (He isn’t going to take any of them home, they know that. He never had; he never does. There are rumors that Dean had started getting into bars at sixteen, hustling pool, drinking whiskey. He takes older women home, women who are comfortable with the word _fuck_ on their tongues. Women whose lives have already started.)

Are they forgetting that Dean Winchester had (allegedly) killed someone? Had gunned down his mother’s bare-naked lover with a .22 caliber bullet, fired a new tunnel into the man’s head? Brain had been left all over the oak furniture, the white carpet. Bits of skull and hair, blood and skin. _He had to have had a reason._ The boys gather in groups, smoking their cigarettes in the way they had seen Dean do it. “Do you think he said something before he pulled the trigger? Something really cool?” Chuck Shurley asks, exhaling the smoke a little too quickly, barely pulling it into his mouth.

Seventeen years old, all of them. Seventeen, hanging on the edge of childhood. Almost adult, almost human. Who do they belong to? Not to their parents, not to their teachers, not to the police, certainly. They belong to Dean Winchester.

Meg (who had come late to loving Dean Winchester, who had looked down her nose at the rest of them all this time) leans over the metal trashbin for the apartments. “What are you _doing,_ Meg?” Charlie asks, incredulous at seeing Meg’s long, curved legs next to the ripped bags, spewing their revolting mixture of coffee and soda, pickle juice and spoiled milk. Meg laughs, her arms deep in the bags, tearing through. Beyond it all, uncaring.

“I’ve got it!” She whispers, holding something precious as the grail. “He touched this. Dean Winchester’s actual mouth touched this.” She holds aloft a dented aluminum soda can. “His _actual_ lips.”

There is a hush, a nervous laugh. “You’re fuckin’ nuts, Meg,” Crowley says, shaking his dark head. _Nuts._ But they all pass the aluminum can around, wagering on the chance that Dean had touched it. Once maybe, once upon a time. Meg takes it back, nestles it in her purse. She would keep it for years, long after Dean’s legacy had quieted. She had saved it from the trash. Snatched it from oblivion.

(Sometimes, they are embarrassed by their own audacity, knowing that Dean would be uncomfortable with the excess, the forwardness. Dean, who never said a complaining word. He’d torn his ACL on the field once, his face had strained and sweat had popped but he’d limped off with his back still straight, never said a thing other than _“Think I’m outta the game, coach.”_ )

_Dean Winchester came outta the west._

 

* * *

 

“What about prom?” They said, whispering between lockers. “Do you think he’ll go?”

“Of course he will. He’ll be there,” Gabriel says, drinking a Coke, “He _has_ to be.” (Does he?)

When Castiel cannot sleep, he reads. He keeps a book of words and facts, as if he can explore the boundaries of the world by mastering what is already known. He is fascinated by extremes, collecting them in his little book, pinning them to his wall.

Consider extremes. The highest point on land accessible by vehicle is on Ojos del Salado in Chile. The lowest point we have ever reached is 12,262 meters deep in the Kola superdeep borehole. The lowest natural point, however, is the Challenger Deep, at the bottom of the dark Mariana Trench in that king of oceans, the Pacific. The most distant point on the earth from an ocean is the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility, in Xinjiang near Kazakhstan. It is in the Dzoosotoyn Elisen Desert, alien to water. It is not far from here, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, that the first space exploration had occurred with the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957. Is it so strange that, since the exploration of the sea had been denied to us here, we had sought the sky instead?

 _“Don’t ever fall in love,”_ his mother had said. She had had her ways of protecting herself. She wouldn’t stand in front of ovens, terrified of the fumes. When you are terrified of something, it sticks in the mind. A black morass, a sticky patch, spilled molasses. His mother had never gotten over death, so she had gone to it willingly, had designed it on her own terms. It wasn’t death that had terrified her, had chilled her bones. It was the unknown. The day haunted Cas’ dreams. They had flown too close to the sun and how quickly the gods had smashed their chariot. _In pace resquiat._

It had been winter when she’d done it. The winter had come early in the middle of November. It had snowed and iced over drafty windows, the police car had spun lightly on a patch of black ice while coming up the winding driveway.  The _schutzstaffel_ , the blackshirts who came and asked questions about her, about their inner lives. “Never tell our secrets,” Mama had whispered once, long ago. She and Castiel against the world. Not the investigators, the police, the medical examiners. They were the _others._

“Did she say anything about this to you? Did she seem happier at all, start giving things away?” The officer asked. Cas had sat silently for several minutes, thinking about the litany of things that were wrong but not quite. Remember his mother. How she had hesitated over bridges, how she had laughed until she cried, how she had never slept. Nothing explained why she had done it. Nothing would say goodbye. He is left with only this, the nothing and the madness, which had eaten her alive. Always too much, always over the top. Her highs were ecstatic, the lows as deep as the trench in the sea, that abyssal portal to Hell. How could Castiel explain that his mother hadn’t left the chair by the window for months? That she had played Leonard Cohen’s _Suzanne_ on repeat?

_Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river._

The sun is warm on his skin. He’s curled into an uncomfortable position around the old tomcat, who always managed to worm his way and stretch out over the center of the bed. Rather than move him, Cas contorted into strange positions, precariously close to falling, a tiny wisp of covers to cover his bare shoulder. The sun falls on him, he falls on the cat in shadow. What about sunlight? He thinks of the sunlight traveling at 186,000 miles per second to get there, blocked by his momentary movement into that spot on the Earth.

 _Am I in love with him? Or do I want to be him?_ (Is there a difference?)

 

* * *

 

Castiel Novak had been the first person in Knucklebone to see Dean Winchester. He’d mentioned it once and the story had spread, so he is still peppered with the question, _“How did it go again?”_

It had gone like this. Somewhere around three-thirty in the afternoon, about four years ago, deep in the sick heat of summer, that night-painted Impala had rolled up to the intersection of Main and Superior. The thing about that panther of a car, that beast of a vehicle, is that it is a car to notice. It draws your attention as a magnet might, up to it, down the sleek doors, the chrome detailing. So Cas had looked. The sheriff had looked too, especially at the strange weaving of the driving, the out-of-state plates. Castiel had never noticed cars before, not in his entire thirteen-year-old life, but this was really _something_.

Then he came next, Dean Winchester, fourteen-years-old and growing fast but not quite enough to see properly, so he perched on a pile of bibles and yellow page phone books. Tan already, from somewhere more friendly with the sun than Knucklebone. Sideburns already, patchy beard growing in already (enough to make Castiel self-conscious). He wore a pair of dark sunglasses, a big silver watch that slipped down his skinny arm. Cas ate up the curve of his legs, the squat fingers, the square chin. His hair like wheatfields. Dean, born eight months before Castiel. Aquarius to his Virgo. Winter to Summer.

“Did he look at you?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel says. “I don’t know.”

 

* * *

 

Dean Winchester is released from probation after sixteen months. One day, shortly later, his car is gone, the apartment empty. Vanished without a forwarding address, without a goodbye. Knucklebone High gasps, suckerpunched. _We thought we meant more to you, Dean Winchester._

 _Where are you going?_ Castiel wants to ask, _where have you been?_

He did not go to the prom nor walk at their graduation. The articles would fade out over the years, always reprinting the same headshots, the same bloodied face, same fat lip. They would all change, curling up around their memories of these hot years, their heated obsession in the face of the future. They had been young once and beautiful. Muscular and angry, beating out at the world, fierce as a boy with a gun. The years would slip by, they would grow soft around the middle. Gain wives and husbands, children. Credit card debt and houses with pools. This would always define them; _I knew Dean Winchester once._

There was a storm on the day of Knucklebone’s senior prom that year. The clouds had rolled in, thick and dyspeptic, full of dysentery and disease. They had watched every boy enter the gymnasium, transformed by low lights and tinsel. Each boy crept in, an apology on his shoulders, in his arms. _Sorry,_ they all seemed to say, _I’m not him._

On the last day that Dean had attended Knucklebone High, Castiel had dropped his textbooks. They had tumbled out of his hands, too heavy and too high. Castiel always tries to pile them high, to take a single trip. He wants _too much_ and _too fast,_ his arms are never big enough to hold it all.

“Hey,” a low voice.  A memorized voice from a strong throat. Castiel looks up at Dean, who had gestured to the books, “Let me get those for you.” They had split the pile, Castiel walking to class with Dean following, silent. His books all bear his name, _Castiel Novak, Castiel Novak, Castiel Novak._ If Dean has never touched Cas, never thought of him, at least he has held Castiel’s name.

  


_Part Two_

Mr. Fix-It

 

_Muskegon, Michigan_

_2019_

 

Roads again. There’s a strange promise to the interstates, the highways, that cross the states, the country. They run like ribbons in curls and lines, dance across the Great Plains, cavort over the gentle Appalachians, the wild Rockies. Castiel likes road trips, he takes them as often as he can. Each turn onto the highway is a sort of promise. _I could go anywhere._ When his engine light comes on, it’s a simple enough idea of where to go. He’s seen the sign while driving past on the highway. _Mr. Fix-It._ It’s a white sign, handpainted with huge blue block letters. _Mr. Fix-It: Auto Repair Anywhere!_

Mr. Fix-It is well-known around southwest Michigan. In his late-thirties, perhaps. He keeps to himself, always gentle and tanned, broad-smiled and green-eyed. If he’s a bit lean, if he’s a bit hungry-looking, then it just makes women (and a few men) want to invite him in for a sandwich, a slice of pie. He’s got the look that makes you want to ask questions; he’s got a look that suggests that you should not. He’s always kind, polite, wisecracking in a deft way that makes you feel in on the joke, feel like you know Mr. Fix-It intimately. It’s only later, hours after he leaves, that it dawns that you know nothing about his past at all. His brother (taller, longer-haired in that same sandy way) is easier to talk to, but just as reticent to talk about history.

Mr. Fix-It is a simple sort. Usually showing up in flannel shirts and paint-spattered jeans, work boots and tool belt. Always clean and clean-shaven. He lives with his brother in a small two-story house on the far side of Muskegon, close to the lake, where the country roads stretch out into miles between neighbors. They’ve lived there, Mr. Fix-It and Sam, for about ten years.

It hadn’t taken long for the locals to adopt him as one of their own. He has the air of someone who has gone a lot of places and isn’t interested in _places_ anymore. He is a good listener or, at least, appears to be. He rarely asks questions, no one asks him questions. They want to, perhaps, but there is a boyishness about the shrug of the square shoulders, the anxiously cocksure smile, that makes everyone say _don’t worry, Mr. Fix-It, you’re alright._ When Mr. Fix-It smiles, which is often, everyone smiles back.

When Castiel comes to the shop, he is thinking about his bank account, his little savings for emergency repairs. Castiel, who has a life built on accidents. This moment is an accident. Unplanned, unreal. Mr. Fix-It, with a tanned, freckled face and grease-stained jeans. Look at the broad face, the easy smile, the bow-legged stance. Cas swallows up the changes, adding and subtracting them from his knowledge of Dean, creating something new. The strands of grey hair at the temples, the crow’s feet at the eyes, a gentler grin.

“You’re Dean Winchester.” It comes out of his mouth before he can think, before he can grab it with his foolish, inadequate hands and shove it back in. Dean Winchester, made real from air. Older, eyes still the color of lichen and mold. Castiel had looked for Dean in the spaces after, in the long stretch of years. It had been infuriating to find that there was little on the man, that the trail had essentially stopped after Dean had left Knucklebone twenty years ago. Perhaps, Castiel wonders, perhaps he has gone mad, perhaps his memories have failed him. Perhaps, Dean is only a figment of his fevered seventeen-year-old imagination. A character in a book. _Did I invent you?_ (It cannot be an invention. Search engines tell the sordid tale of the lover, naked and dead. Of the blood, the gun, the chase. Then, always nothing. Dust maybe. The trail runs cold but the bitter truth remains in the center of it. Dean had existed once.)

Dean hesitates, smiles a bit, “I’ve been called worse.” He wipes the ink-dark oil from his hands with an old towel. “You gotta name there, trenchcoat? You look familiar.”

“Castiel Novak,” he breathes. _Do you remember me? You carried my books once._ “I went to Knucklebone High.”

Dean nods. “Huh,” he says. “So tell me about your car.”

 

* * *

 

“What kinda work do you do, Cas?” Dean leans over the engine, sweat from the July heat on his brow. He doesn’t look up. (Castiel doesn’t look away.)

“I’m a writer.” The suspicion is there again. In a hot minute, Castiel realizes there has likely been no shortage of reporters and true crime novelists at his door. He fumbles in his bag for an old copy of his favorite piece.

“Science-fiction, usually. And dystopias.” Dean’s shoulders relax slightly.

“I’m a big fan of sci-fi.”

“Really?” He doesn’t say what crowds at his tongue. _I didn’t know that, what else don’t I know about you?_

“I’ve read some of your stuff actually,” Dean says, stopping Castiel’s breath with a word. “Don’t be a stranger, Cas.” Dean hands him the receipt. Cas studies the irises of the other man, moss ringed with earthworm brown. Catalogues the features, afraid of Dean disappearing again into the air and the ether, afraid of his own forgetfulness.

 

* * *

 

It is, perhaps, half-intentional that Castiel begins frequenting the bars in a fifteen-mile radius from Mr. Fix-It’s workshop. It takes about a week and a half before he is rewarded with the rolling gait, the grass-green eyes slung across the room, cataloging the inhabitants. He gives a slight nod when he lands on Castiel, perched at the distal end of the long bar and nursing a pint. Cas nods back, a tight smile on his lips. He expects Dean to keep his distance, he is surprised when Dean does not.

“What are ya havin’, Winchester?” The barkeeper asks, pulling a glass down already. An old dance then, this one.

“Let’s do the Woodford.”

“Straight?”

“Yeah, a double. Thanks.”

“So,” Dean says, picking at his sleeve, “Knucklebone, eh?” Castiel studies the face. You could use the strong nose like a ruler, draw a straight line from point A to point B.

“Yes.”

“You were in my class, weren’t you?”

“Yes, Dean, I was.”

“Sorry, I do remember you. Promise.” Dean sounds sorry, it sounds genuine. When has Dean not been genuine? “Bit of a blur for me, that’s all.” _Of course it was, of course he wasn’t focused on you. He’d been the focus of a national manhunt. There had been a dead body in his mother’s bedroom. Maybe he’d put it there._ (It should be horrifying, standing next to a potential murderer. He feels oddly safe in Dean’s presence. There is an air of the protector. _Self-defense,_ the defense had said.)

“It’s alright. There isn’t much to remember.”

Dean nods, takes a sip of the bourbon. “What brings you around here?”

“I live nearby.”

“So, the writing.”

“Yes?”

“I really liked _Go West._ You’re really good at tension, you know? Outsiders and feelin’ out of place.”

“Thank you, Dean.” What does Cas hold back? What does he not say? _Write what you know,_ all the advice goes. _I have written my own story, time and time over, infinitely repeating. Who is that outcast? Me. You (maybe). In the stories, we are from different planets, different worlds. What is the truth? Age sixteen in a small agricultural town, deep in Michigan trees, on the edge of a maneater lake. Age sixteen and buried in churches and Bibles, women who fix your ties, men who chew tobacco. Age sixteen, waking up in a dead sweat knowing that something is wrong, what you ache for is wrong. The wrongness isn’t the outside world, it is you. Within you and without you. How do you handle the wrongness? Curl up around it, swallow it down. Oysters form pearls around bits of sand that creep into them. It grates at them, scrapes at them from the inside out. So they deposit layers of nacre around the sand, form it up into a pearl. Read the stories, the words, all and only nacre. Beautiful, maybe. Still sand, still ache and scrape, burning from the inside out._

He fiddles with the coaster, something in the set of his jaw approaches anxious. Awkward. “You should come over some time. You know, if you want.”

 _You’re like me, aren’t you?_ (It is something he has never dared to dream. Even in the heat of the summer, the even in the claustrophobic obsession of his senior year, Dean Winchester, heartthrob and convicted murderer, Castiel had never dared to think that he might be invited in by Dean. Never thought that maybe, just perhaps, the same _wrongness_ might swim through Dean’s veins, his arteries, formed in his marrow. Like to like, children of the sun fumbling and wanting bodies like their own. He can feel the familiar thrill of recognition. He can identify the sharpness in Dean’s words. What is said; what is left unsaid. _You are like me and I am like you.)_

“Yes, Dean,” he says, “I’d like that.”

 

* * *

 

Dean invites him over on a Friday.

The house is white. Wild lilac dominates it. Eight feet, nine feet tall. The smell of the flowers hangs heavy in the air. An apple orchard had once existed on the farmhouse’s property but it has been left wild and rampant, no longer an orchard. A thicket. A clutch of heavy-fruited trees. But it is spring and the apples are small, little nothings still. At the edge of the house, the black Impala lays in wait, sharp as a knife, black as dirt.

“Hey Cas,” Dean says, pushing open the screen door. There is the faintest favoring of his right leg, the smallest scar on his left cheek. Memories of his purpled, bloodied face surface. A boy caught out in handcuffs, face like a rotten plum.

He blinks at walking into the room. It is scrupulously clean, sunlight coming through the windows. What surprises Castiel are the far walls, lined with movies, a few low shelves of books with well-loved spines. There is a poster on the wall, carefully framed, of _The Empire Strikes Back._ Across the way, Ripley stares out from a print of the movie poster of _Alien._ The titles on the shelves rapidly build like cells into a new image, rebuilding Dean Winchester in front of him. _Breakfast of Champions, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World._ It is a bit of a surprise to find such a well-stocked collection. Spines of books like piano keys, ready to be pulled out and played. It is the library of a reader, betraying Dean as easily as DNA. As easily as a thumbprint. When you read the titles of someone else’s collection, you read their mind. Cas knows Dean better than he ever had, trailing one eye over a battered copy of _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ Better than the memorization of a leather jacket, a clenched fist.

Dean flushes a little at the scrutiny of his collection. “Most of the good books are Sam’s. You know, the _literary_ shit. I’m more of a Vonnegut and _Brave New World_ guy myself.”

Castiel grins, “I write that kind of stuff, you know that.”

“Touche,” a soft smirk, hands in his pockets. “Just not really used to talking about it with anyone other than Sam. He’s the real nerd around here.” The gentle implication rides like an undercurrent to the words. _Sam is the reader, you might like him more than you like me._

“You look like a nerd to me.”

“Come on, Cas,” Dean says, a grin in his eyes, “I want to show you something.”

“What?”

“Just trust me.”

They go past the apple orchard, or what is left of it, past the long hills that roll up into wild dunes. The grass fades from deep green to a pale, dead tan and long as arms, scratching at Cas’ legs as they walk. The dunegrass like the arms of the dead, trying to pull him down amongst them, into their foul river. Styx, the river might be called, which circled the underworld seven times. Phlegethon, maybe, born in fire. Acheron, perhaps, which is the only river of the underworld that shares space with the living. It runs through northwest Greece, that river of woe. Charon takes us all across it eventually, guiding his little boat.

Past the grass though, the lake opens like a sea. Endless, vast, and deep. The sun dappled on the water, that grey-blue net of waves. Lashing against sand, against stone. Driftwood and dead alewives, swept up to their feet.

“I thought you might like this,” Dean murmurs, quiet and steady as a mill.

“I do,” Cas says. _I love it, I do. Thank you for showing me your piece of the world._

“My mom is from here,” Dean says, looking at the water. “I’m not. But it’s always familiar to me, based on her stories.”

Castiel nods, images of white-bloused and pale-haired Mary Winchester in his mind. “Where did you grow up?”

Dean shrugs, “Out in Kansas.” _Dean Winchester came outta the West._ He pauses and looks again at the younger man, “I’m glad you came, buddy.” The easy smile again, those hands shoved in those denim pockets as he’d always done. Some things don’t change. The wind ruffles his hair.

They double back to the house, passing the eel-dark Impala. Cas lets his gaze linger, still aching to climb inside. “I remember this car.”

“It was my dad’s.”

“I thought they took it after -”

“I got it back,” Dean mutters, quiet and dark.

 

* * *

 

“Do you think he might come?” The rumors fly back and forth in Knucklebone. The twentieth reunion looms. _Will Dean Winchester come?_

“I don’t know. He didn’t come last time.”

“I wonder what he’s doing.”

“I hear he’s a porn star.”

“I heard that he made money in real estate.”

“My mom told me he’s still in prison.”

Castiel shrugs, he says nothing. Dean wouldn’t want anyone to know. (Castiel doesn’t want to share.) Sometimes explorers do not want to share what they have found. These private spaces, this part of the world that is only ours and no one else’s. _Keep out._ What is more fascinating than somewhere that no human has gone? The earth has been conquered already, we have lost interest. What are those last frontiers? The edges of the solar system, the bottom of the ocean. Sky and sea. We are creatures of earth, we want so much more.

Who has discovered you, Dean Winchester? Castiel knows that everyone has been to his own common spaces, his smiles, his laughter. Who has reached the edges of his own frontiers? _I want to know you. I want you to know me. Let me write you a love poem. I will let you explore everywhere that has never been touched. Everywhere that has never been seen. My ribs like sand dunes, like mountains and hills. My tongue will skate down your shoulder blades like avalanches. I am a cavedweller, I want to curl up in the dark cave of the atriums of your heart, knitting oxygen to your blood, breathing my name into each cell. Your blood will travel everywhere that I cannot, carrying my name with it like you once carried my name within my books._

 

* * *

 

“Do you want a drink?” Dean moves to the small bar setup, pulling himself a glass.

“What are you having?”

“The Laprohaig.”

Castiel nods, saying nothing. Don’t talk with your mouth full, his mother had said. Castiel’s mouth is full of swallowing up the look of Dean, the flannel shirt sleeves pushed up over his elbows, tanned and vascular forearms displayed to the world. He memorizes the veins, blue and green, like he would a map of rivers. Yes, Castiel would like a drink.

“Did you do it?” Castiel asks, breath caught between his teeth.

Dean shrugs. Says nothing. Castiel looks at their hands, near each other on the table. Not touching (never touching). The same shape, the same bones and skin. Dean’s is slightly larger than Castiel’s, rougher and more callused. The lines are there too. The same lines over his face, at the corners of his mouth, are there on the back of the hand, in the knuckles. They wear their years like a glossary of little pains and little hurts. A mask of _too little_ ; a mask of _not enough._

“What do you want me to say, Cas?” Bitterness drips from his mouth like a poison. “Do you want me to tell you that I murdered him in cold blood? That I thought about it for weeks? Planned it? That I’d had diagrams and shit?”

“No. You don’t have to tell me anything at all.” Dean’s shoulders slump.

When his voice comes, it is quiet. “He was beating her, you know. Not when I was around, but I knew. You can tell. You can always tell. I came home early from practice, I dunno, coach was sick or something. And he was at it and I didn’t even think, Cas, I didn’t hesitate.” He pauses for a long moment, staring at something in the corner. Spiderwebs, perhaps. “You wanna know the worst part?”

_What can be the worst of the worst?_

“I don’t even regret it, Cas. I’d do it again.” He watches Cas, caution in the lines of his face, his set jaw.

The sun has long disappeared below the ground. Castiel lifts the glass, the whiskey like a burn on his tongue. Caustic, strangely compelling.

"What do you think of the scotch?” Dean’s fawn-colored eyes stare intently. He is asking a different question, they are both aware of that. Words do not always align with their meaning. What about metaphor? What about simile? But Castiel is not fluent. His skin prickles with gooseflesh, looking for a translation.

“I like it,” Cas says, voice low.

"That’s good, ‘cause that shit is like a day’s worth of profits." Dean says, “Don’t tell Sammy.” A wink. A roguish smile. How had they drawn together so closely? Dean and Castiel, Castiel and Dean. A net has been cast over them, strong as spiderwebs, slowly decreasing the space between their bodies. Destruction looms imminent.  


* * *

 

Should he be horrified? _A vicious boy murderer,_ the papers had called Dean. He thinks of the gun, the Colt .22 that had featured on all the channels, the papers, the grim television miniseries released a few years later (long after the Winchesters were gone; long after Dean had split). Castiel has never fired a gun, he has barely seen a drop of blood past a paper cut. He is nervous about killing spiders, instead he cups them up, sets them free outside. Still, he might understand a little about that cruel night twenty years ago. _I cannot blame you._

He wonders what it is like to hold a gun, to fire it, aim it at a living being. Master of time (this is the end); master of space (you’re going nowhere). The papers had all talked of the Colt, licensed to Bobby Singer. _Maybe he stole it months before the crime. Maybe he’d been planning it this whole time._

“No, ma,” Castiel can hear Dean’s voice on the phone through the door to the bedroom. Tired, worn. “You didn’t let me down.”

He had always been fascinated by Dean, the stone face, the heart that could not be broken (it has been broken this entire time). They haven’t talked of Dean’s mother, of Mary Winchester (this whole damn thing had started in her bedroom). She’d fascinated the town, always dressed in white, a throaty laugh, that shock of sandy hair (Mary and her two boys, cast out into space).

“Why did they leave?” Castiel asks later, sitting next to Dean on the bed. He has always wondered. He runs a tentative hand over Dean’s tense shoulders.

“Ma just wanted to get Sammy out of there. The reporters were like goddamn fuckin’ vultures.” He crosses his arms. Castiel’s hungry eyes follow the movement, like intertwined branches. Carved cedarwood. Castiel clenches his fingers tightly, always curious, ever curious. He has never touched Dean Winchester, he needs to _know._ It had been so different, the death of Robert Stephenson. To Castiel, to Knucklebone, it had been their defining moment. Their thrill to a boy with a gun. To Dean, it had been a poison.

“You didn’t deserve any of that, Dean.”

“I _killed_ a man.”

Castiel is quiet. “I know.” (Dean drops his head against his chest. Twenty years of ache. Twenty years of self-hatred.) “You were defending your mother.”

“Does that matter?”

“I think it does, Dean.”

“Cas -”

“But,” Castiel says, eyes like a lake. Like the sea reaches for the green grass. “I’ve always had a weak spot where you were concerned. I was terrified to talk to you.”

“Fuck, Cas. I was an idiot kid, I didn’t know what I was doing. I just kept my mouth shut.” There are words in the twist of the mouth. Castiel can see them though Dean does not give them voice. _I just kept my mouth shut, it was all I knew how to do._ It is the expression he had never expected on Dean Winchester. He has seen the cocksure grin, the thrown-back laugh, the silent glare of _go fuck yourself._ There, rising to the surface like a drowned man, is quiet self-doubt, aching misery. Castiel runs one hand along Dean’s shoulder, down the well-muscled arm.

_You were born in January to the waterbearer. Air sign, fixed. Aquarius-haired and Aquarius-breathed. You are always in the sky, hoping for more, reaching for more, staring down roads and other places, going somewhere (going anywhere). I was born in September to the earth. Virgo-tongued and Virgo-eyed. I can never reach you, where I end is where you begin. I will build mountains, structures, trying to touch you. Trying to reach you, if only for a moment. Let me love you, that old love story. You know how it goes, the earth and the sky._

“I don’t deserve this, Cas.”

“You deserve everything, Dean.”

We are always aware of _rules._ There is a limit to personal space. How close you can get, how long you can look, linger over something. Castiel knows they have broached past the limit, have walked into this liminal space of _what next?_ You cannot get within six inches of someone else’s mouth without touching it, without a fist or a kiss. They are dangerously close, tightened by cobwebs and the nothingness of silence. _Say something,_ the voice in Castiel’s mind sounds. _Say something, but what should I say?_ What is there to say? He is a writer, he should be good at this but he is _terrible_ when it matters, terrible without a pen and someone else’s mouth to shove the words into, to absolve himself of their weight.

What to say? _I want you._ It sits there heavy as a corpse, weighted as the sea. God, those wretched, clumsy words. There are a myriad of wants (he wants everything). He looks at Dean with the eyes of the explorer, driven by curiosity, by wanderlust, by the heavy ache of possession. “What are we doing?” A whisper cast out into the air, the spaces of breath.

“What do you mean?” Dean asks. Questions in his mouth, questions in his hands.

“Have you ever -“ _Have you ever done this before? I’ve always wondered what you think about at night, in the morning, in the shower._

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Castiel asks. Dean takes Cas’ fingers and brings them to his mouth. His lips are warm as embers, they will leave burnmarks in their wake. _Am I mad?_

“Not a chance in hell, buddy.” But there are other ways of talking, ways that Dean is more comfortable in. His fingertips tap out secrets on Castiel’s arms, his bared chest, his back. Castiel hesitates, mouths scarce millimeters apart, holding out the stanza, the chorus bridge before diving into the deep. Don’t we always want to stretch out the moment before joy? The springtime, the long march of Advent. _Joy is coming, yes yes yes, I will be happy soon._ Is happiness the goal or is it the promise of its return? Once it rolls up, that big beautiful summer, don’t we immediately begin planning for the winter? (Those who have been without are planners. Stockpile supplies for the lean times.) “Why are you so good to me? _Fuck,_ Cas. I don’t even know how you do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re just like… fuck, I don’t know how to say it. I wish I could write books like you do. Words and I don’t really get along.”

Not all words surface easily. Think of the generation of light. It takes thousands of years for a photon to emerge from the center of the sun to the surface yet only eight minutes to reach the earth. Love is not so different. It germinates slowly, the realization is a slow surfacing. But once the nature of love is realized, it bursts out of us. We cannot stop ourselves from shouting it to the sky.

 _I love you, Dean Winchester._ Castiel thinks of his younger self, his seventeen-year-old self, who had dreamt of being in love with Dean. His younger self that had never really known Dean, had never tried to know Dean. _You didn’t know what love was. And you didn’t deserve him. Not then._ It is different now, age thirty-seven, with the taste of the man on his tongue, who knows the sound of a nightmare. Age thirty-seven, knowing the stories, the bricks that build up Dean. How he had driven most of the two-thousand-odd miles from Lawrence, Kansas to Knucklebone, Michigan while his mother was sleeping or sobbing in the front seat, while Sammy sat in the back, with a quietness that had set his teeth on edge. How he’d had a headache for months straight, between the stress, the untreated toothache. He’d chased down painkiller after painkiller with lukewarm beer, trying to dull the ache in his mouth (his head, behind his eyes), had developed a mild stomach ulcer. _I’m so sorry, baby,_ his mother had said, _I’ll make it up to you, I promise._ (And past it all, through it all, the goddamn smoke still caught in his clothes, his eyes still burned from the house fire. His father, dead and gone now, his pilot’s watch cold and heavy on Dean’s skinny wrist. Thirteen years old.) Castiel knows these things now, age thirty-seven. He hadn’t known them before (he had never asked).

“You’re mine already, aren’t you?” A whisper, air like fingers against his skin. Then skin, actual work-roughened fingers, at his arms, his shoulders.

“I’ve always been yours,” Castiel whispers, hiding his words in Dean’s skin. _Yes yes yes, I have always been yours._ “I just never told you.”

He doesn’t understand why Dean watches him, tries to read the divots and bumps of his body. Castiel is not like Dean, he is as ordinary as the ocean on a day without wind. So Dean comes, the heady wind. His breath blows hot across Castiel’s skin. Castiel lays on a blade of light peeking through the curtain. It runs across him. When he closes his eyelids, they turn a garish red shot through with little veins. Tiny capillaries. (Some capillaries are so small that the blood cells can only march through one by one, single file. His love for Dean on the backs of them, parceled down like a supply line.)

_I want you._

Dean’s hands fumble at his back, his shoulder blades, as if they are searching for wings to grab onto. To hold tight. Castiel arches like a cat into the touch, writhes like a beached eel across the simple cotton sheets. His heartbeat sings with the words _I love you I love you I love you._ Everyone will tell him later of the danger of his love. _“He’s a murderer,”_ they will say, _“A criminal.”_ Judgments pouring from their mouths like water. Too much spit. Too much. Love is stronger than reason. It cannot be legislated, held behind dividers. Doors and walls. Anyone who says love can be reasoned with, can be boxed up and put away, has never really loved.

Let us do something different. Castiel wants _different_ with Dean, aches to demarcate this love from all the little loves that have come before. This is the big one, the wave at the end of the sea. Dean takes Castiel’s face between his hands, the long, rough fingers like a frame. Thumbs hooked under the jaw. How does a kiss start? The question of mouths come first, that initial press of skin to skin. _Do you?_ (We ask, lip to lip, gentle and wanting to explore.) _Yes,_ is the answer. Explore. Get into your submarine and sink within. Don’t forget to breathe.

Dean, standing on the shoreline, keeper of the lake. Come, explore. This place is not like what you have known. Castiel will burn the ground for Dean, raze his own history. What is love without risk? Castiel’s fingers trail the topography of the ocean floor that is Dean’s skin. The divot of his throat, the bend of his arms, the backs of his knees. Down, down the long chest, down the undulating stomach. Past the forest between his thighs. Where is the deepest, darkest spot of the earth? Of ourselves? Come to the Challenger Deep. There is nothing unnatural here, nothing not meant to be. The sun does not peek, there is only a warm darkness. Dark, like before sight was bestowed. Before the day was created. Even in the deepest black, there is life. On the ocean floor, there are bony teleost fish, soft-shelled foraminifera. Between the thighs, the Bermuda Triangle. Tongues, hands, a sharp cry. _I love you._

 

* * *

 

“This orchard is my favorite.” They stand in the thicket, the apples dropped about them. It is late September, harvest season.

“You serious, Cas? It’s a waste,” Dean says. “The only good tree is the one by the house. It doesn’t fruit.”

“It’s beautiful, Dean.”

“Nah, buddy. They drop all the apples all over, rot out. It kills the grass.”

“Why is grass better than apples?” Dean stares at Cas with wide eyes, a quirk of the lip. _Grass is not the only thing worth growing._

“You’re a weird dude, Cas. You know that?” But his mouth is curving into that private smile that he keeps between them, just the two of them. Dean and Castiel against the world.

“So you’ve told me,” Cas murmurs. He holds the cup of coffee in his hand, ceramic mug hot against his skin. It could burn him if he’s not careful. (Dean could burn him if he’s not careful. Castiel leans into the bright flame, willing to be risked.) “Do you believe in fate?”

“Not really,” Dean says, eyes sliding to the floor, “It’s better if I don’t.”

_I think I might. Have you ever heard the story of the red thread? An old legend in east Asia? The thread is thin and taut, tied around our little fingers maybe, our ankles maybe. It does not matter where we meet or when, the thread is always there, always connecting us cell by little cell, breath by breath. It will never break. What about Plato and his Symposium? Were we one beast once, moving together without a back, only two fronts? We had never known loneliness, complete and whole within ourselves. And then the gods had ripped us apart for our insolence, right down the middle. Are you a puzzle piece?_

Castiel nods.

With a quirk of the brow, Dean borrows the mug. Takes a sip of Castiel’s coffee. “Why, what do you think is out there, Cas?”

“Heaven, Dean, a bright and beautiful Heaven.”

“I dunno, not sure I believe in Heaven.”

Cas looks at Dean, the freckles across the bridge of the nose, the gold grain in his irises. “I do.”

What roads end here, in this bed, on this sunny day? What explorer found this land, this fountain of flowers and youth and love, planted a flag on the coast and said _yes yes yes this is mine?_ How many stories of us are there? Infinite permutations, held in others’ minds that we will never know, never read, never hear. Perhaps, somewhere, (we do not know where) there is another story of Castiel and Dean, always different but with the same old bones, the same old story. Roads and an old Colt gun, _Star Wars_ and _Indiana Jones,_ cherry pies. A bit of whiskey spilled into every life. The shadow of sadness, perhaps, the shadow of angels.

Look at the earth, the sea, the sky. The edges of our lives and ourselves left untouched and unexplored. Our earth, reaching out with wide arms asking _where are you going?_ Asking _where have you been?_

**Author's Note:**

> When I was about fourteen, Joyce Carol Oates released _Broke Heart Blues_ , which I inhaled, feasting on the story of a small town obsessed with their own dreams and projections. A story of myself, a story of everyone I knew, a story retold here with love. Thank you, to Joyce Carol Oates, who inspired in me the love of fiction and the art of the story.


End file.
